Following
the editors’ introduction to the collection, the essays in Scholarly Milton examine the
nature of Milton’s own formidable scholarship and its implications for his
prose and poetry–“scholarly Milton” the writer–as well as subsequent scholars’
historical and theoretical framing of Milton studies as an object of scholarly
attention–“scholarly Milton” as at first an emergent and later an established
academic discipline. The essays are particularly concerned with the topics of
the ethical ends of learning, of Milton’s attention to the trivium within the
Renaissance humanist educational system, and the development of scholarly
commentary on Milton’s writings. Originally selected from the best essays
presented at the 2015 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the
essays have been considerably revised and expanded for publication.
Thomas Festa is Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He is the author of The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006) and some two dozen scholarly articles as well as co-editor of the award-winning feminist teaching anthology, Early Modern Women on the Fall (2012), and two previous essay collections dedicated to Milton’s works, Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment (2017) and Scholarly Milton (2019). KEVIN J. DONOVAN, Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, co-directed with Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt the biennial Conference on John Milton from 1991 to 2015. With Thomas Festa he co-edited Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment (Duquesne UP, 2017). He also wrote the Survey of Interpretive Criticism for the New Variorum Shakespeare King Lear, edited by Richard Knowles (forthcoming 2019, MLA) and is associate editor of the volume.